About this workshop notebook
Who writes Nurtured Clay, how the entries are produced, how corrections are handled, and what the site will never do.
What this site is
Nurtured Clay is a working notebook from a small pottery workshop. It records how pieces are actually made: the clay body, the cone, the wall thickness, the order of operations, and — the part that is usually missing from books — the specific ways each process fails and what causes the failure.
It is written for people who already have clay on their hands. If you have never centred a lump of clay on a wheel, the entries will still make sense, but they will make much more sense after your first ten kilograms.
How an entry is produced
Every entry starts as notes taken during a real session. The numbers in it — wall thickness, firing schedule, oxide charge, soak time — come from that session, not from a reference table. Where a figure is a typical value rather than a measured one, the entry says so.
Temperatures are Orton cone equivalents at a 108 °F per hour rise. The cone number is the primary record because a cone is what the kiln actually measures; the degree figure beside it is a convenience and routinely differs by twenty degrees between firings of the same cone.
The vessel drawing on each entry is not a photograph. It is generated from the recorded rim, belly, foot and height of the form, so it stays correct when those numbers are corrected.
Corrections
Being wrong in a workshop notebook is normal; leaving it wrong is not. Recorded entries are corrected in place when a mistake is found, and the correction is described in the entry rather than silently applied. If you think an entry is wrong, write to us — a specific disagreement about a firing schedule is the most useful mail this site receives.
What this site is not
- It is not affiliated with any kiln manufacturer, clay supplier or glaze materials retailer.
- It carries no sponsored content, no affiliate links and no paid placements. Materials are named because they are what a recipe was tested with.
- It is not a shop, and nothing on it is for sale.
- It does not offer a firing service, valuations, or identification of pots from photographs.
Contact
All correspondence goes to a single address, [email protected]. It is read by the person who keeps the notebook.
This page describes the practices of this site only. It does not describe, and cannot bind, any third party.